Still Controversial After All These Years

[poliphilo]

Kipling is in the news because someone decorated the students union in Manchester with a mural rendition of Kipling's "If" and the student politicians (who hadn't been consulted) painted it out and substituted Maya Angelou's "And I Rise"- because Kipling was "a racist" and "an imperialist".

This revives a controversy that has been going on since Kipling's own day. And those of us who love Kipling should probably welcome it on the grounds that there's no such thing as bad publicity. If he has survived the satire of Max Beerbohm, the wilful misinterpretation of G.K Chesterton and the patronage of T.S. Eliot he will most probably survive the disapproval of Manchester Students Union.

As Orwell notes in his 1942 review of Eliot's snooty edition of Kipling's "Selected Poems", most of Kipling's critics- and perhaps many of his admirers too- haven't actually read him.  Those of us who have read him know he has many voices-  many personae. 

I re-read Orwell's essay this morning- and I don't believe he'd read Kipling either- or at least, not the whole of him. He's perceptive about the imperial Kipling of the 1890s (which isn't to say I agree with all the points he makes) but ignores anything that isn't about Empire or the army- and that's a large body of work. Kipling didn't go into a sulk after the Great War and no-one who had read the great stories about love, healing and forgiveness that date from those years could possibly claim that he did. 

Comments

[poliphilo]

I'd prefer "masculinist" to "sexist". It's an older man talking to a younger man. It doesn't put women down; they just don't come into the picture.

Yes, it's a text from the early 20th century. To expect it to display a 21st century sensibility is asking rather too much of it.

Kipling wrote symathetically of the white working class- soldiers and sailors of course plus their wives and girlfriends, but also rural labourers, servants- and there's a great poem from the Great War which is voiced by a female worker in an armaments factory. I can think of few writers who operate in such a large world.

[cmcmck]

And he had a deep respect for Indian soldiers.

'Stalky IS a Sikh'

Racist? Maybe they need to read 'Gunga Din' with an attentive eye to detail...........

Even 'The White Man's Burden' is suggesting to Americans that empire mightn't be so easy after all.

[poliphilo]

Most writers of his period simply ignored the existence of non-Europeans. How many Indians are there in the works of Henry James or Thomas Hardy? Even Conrad- who wrote about the far East- foregrounded white characters. Kipling may not always have shown a 21st century sensitivity in his treatment of people of colour, but his fiction is full of them. His most famous character- Mowgli- is Indian.

[cmcmck]

And then there's someone really complex like Kim.

[poliphilo]

Of course.

And many of the short stories have a similar complexity.